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Show 350 THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. caxones which intervened. From this position said pass bore eastnortheast. Also were there seen on the tween them." It is pretty rocky old Spanish, but the translation seems to me to be: " They arrived at the gorges of the river which, ( to the people who were) standing ( puestos, masculine) on the expanse thereof, would seem to be more than three or four leagues wide in an air- line," i. e., through the air, from one side of the chasm to the other. I doubt that even Spanish imagination could have made the canon eight or ten miles deep or " up in the air." This description, like the rest of it that I might quote, of the magnitude and impassability of the chasm, fits so many places along the Grand canon, that it has never been determined, and probably never will be known, at what point Cardenas discovered the wonderful abyss. The requisite data do not exist; in their absence, conjecture has been rife; I can point to maps on which Cardenas' hypothetical trail is looped up river to the vicinity of Lee's ferry, and others on which it is dotted down river nearly to Mojave. I believe both these notions to be wild. Cardenas was guided to the great river by Moquis, t. e., he was on a known trail from Moqui to the canon - and what more probable than that this trail was the immemorial one on which Garces is now being taken? If so, Cardenas reached the river at about the place Garces now names Puerto de Bucareli. What next? Nothing forbids us to believe that he simply kept on westward. How far? Well, the narrative speaks of a cataract; and this colors the view that Cardenas kept on into Cataract canon along the same Moqui trail by which Garces has just left that cation; whence he returned to Moqui by the same way he went from that place, with no looping up or down river. All that we know favors this dictamen, and nothing that we know is obnoxious thereto; so I hold it en mi corto entendimiento, salvo otro mejor- as Garces somewhere says about something else. But that is immaterial to the main point of discovery of the Grand canon by Cardenas |